This fourth and final volume of my study of the history of power in human societies covers the period since 1945. It will focus on the three major pillars of postwar global order: capitalism (and the fate of the Soviet and Chinese alternatives to capitalism), the nation-state system, and the sole remaining empire of the world, the United States. The most obvious characteristic of all three in this period is their expansion over the globe, a process universally called globalization. Yet in my third volume I pluraled this term to indicate that more than one process of globalization was under way. As I have argued throughout my volumes, human societies form around four distinct power sources – ideological, economic, military, and political – which have a relative degree of autonomy from each other (this is my IEMP model of power). Their globalizations have also been relatively autonomous and remain so in this period. But the power sources are ideal types. They do not exist in pure form in the real world. Instead, they congeal around the major macroinstitutions of society – in this case, capitalism, the nation-state, and empires. The major novel ideologies of the period emanate from human attempts to understand the entwining of these three.

Let me first give a short definition of the four power sources. More detailed exposition can be found in the first chapters of my other three volumes. Power is the capacity to get others to do things that otherwise they would not do. In order to achieve our goals, whatever they are, we enter into power relations involving both cooperation and conflict with other people, and these relations generate societies. So power may be collective, embodying cooperation to achieve shared goals – power through others– and distributive, wielded by some over others.